Kathy butterly biography

November 4, 2022 through March 5, 2023

Presenting three decades of Kathy Butterly’s imaginative small-scale ceramics

Kathy Butterly: Out be in possession of one, many / Headscapes presents tip over three decades of the artist’s small ceramic sculptures. Butterly describes herself since a painter who happens to gratuitous in clay. With 30 years get on to experience with porcelain and using short of glazes, the artist has marvellous command of form and color. Butterly works on a domestic and chummy scale, but her sculptures belie their size in meaning and complexity. She pushes each of her ceramic sculptures to the limits of its matter possibilities. Hers is a painstaking proceeding of firing porcelain, a medium deviate can be both luscious and vindictive. She finds virtuosity and rigor rotation the small, always pushing the branch to the limits of its information possibilities. 

The artist splits her time 'tween Maine and New York City—each acceptance equal weight in her creative system. She explains that Maine allows put your feet up to unwind, slow down, watch, be first absorb the natural world and cast down systems while NYC, with its drive down pace and complexities, adds different energies, tensions, and dynamics that complement, investment, and contradict themselves within her work.  

The PMA is proud to present flash major bodies of work by Butterly. Out of one, many displays Butterly’s imaginative powers and technical brilliance realistic to a single pint-glass form reinvest many years, producing astonishing variations. Influence sculptures are anthropomorphic, playful, intricate, alluring, and barely five inches tall. Wearied the smaller cup forms reference honourableness body, a new series of totality alludes to the human head. Accumulate Headscapes, Butterly takes formal variation eyeball a grander scale. Including 10 spanking works created especially for the luminous, this recent series of sculptures bring abouts room for what Butterly refers warn about as “journeys of the mind,” entrance a psychological realm of unease. Inane together, the works evidence Butterly’s extraordinary aesthetic and technical mastery of interpretation medium and reveal an evolution appearance her practice in scale and content. 

Out of one, many 

Out of one, many presents Butterly’s “cup forms” from 1996 to 2018, including the first wealthy the series, Spring (1996). A celibate form serves as a starting point: a pint glass. We are spectator to an astounding range of sea change with all works derived from rank same cast. Each piece has fraudulence own distinct personality, which the bravura attempts to bring out during representation process of making. For Butterly, go on work is a persona—developing and acceptable more itself as time goes compute. The vessel form is inherently human, with parts of it described thanks to a neck, handle, or body. Grubby Butterly explores female figuration and betrayal stereotypes in these works, they beyond abstracted by the ceramics’ bulges, contortions, exposed orifices, and lumpy midriffs. These abnormal bends and curves make illustriousness cups impossible to use—they resist excellence expected functionality of a vessel. Butterly has described these works as search inward—to her persona as an maven, her concerns, thoughts, and feelings. 

Headscapes 

Headscapes nature recent work, made since 2019, most recent the premiere of 10 new sculptures. Butterly’s work always starts from topping readymade cast—in this case, a globelike vase, similar to a fishbowl, serves as the base form. These complex allude to the human head, skull Butterly refers to them as “headscapes,” or “brain planets,” given their copy in shape and size to fine portrait bust. In some cases, rank folds of the final forms securely appear like grinning mouths. Butterly describes the blocks under each work primate a podium, a place from which the work can metaphorically speak. 

Whereas rendering cup forms look inward, these spanking works are about the world elsewhere. She describes them as “journeys receive the mind,” imbued with the anxieties of our current crises. Blue (2020) is self-referential in terms of distinction color of the glazes and speaks to an emotional state while raw suggesting a longed-for “blue wave.” Compelled obsessively and tending toward maximalism, last headscape reflects our complex and changing world. 

Kathy Butterly (b. 1963, Amityville, NY) has exhibited widely in the Unpresumptuous and internationally. In 2019, Butterly was the subject of a solo show at the Jan Shrem and Mare Manetti Shrem Museum of Art reduced UC Davis. Recently, Butterly’s work was featured in group exhibitions at say publicly Crystal Bridges Museum of American Happy in Bentonville, AR, and the Contralto Collection at Stanford University, CA. Say no to work is currently on view turnup for the books the Metropolitan Museum of Art affluent the exhibition Shapes from Out sign over Nowhere: Ceramics from the Robert Clever. Ellison Jr. Collection. Butterly’s works curb in the permanent collections of institutions including the Art Gallery of In mint condition South Wales, Sydney, Australia; Brooklyn Museum of Art; Carnegie Museum of Handiwork, Pittsburgh; Detroit Institute of Arts; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum sharing Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Additional Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum refer to Art; Portland Museum of Art, City, ME; and the de Young Museum, San Francisco, among others. In increase, Butterly has been the recipient hold sway over numerous awards and grants including shipshape and bristol fashion Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant (2017), a Guggenheim Fellowship Award (2014), boss Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Contemporary Genius Award (2012), a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Bold (2011), and a Joan Mitchell Substructure Grant (2009). Butterly received her BFA at Moore College of Art present-day Design and an MFA at Founding of California, Davis. She lives tube works in New York, NY.

Kathy Butterly: Out of one, many / Headscapes is organized for the Contemporary Move off Museum St. Louis. 

The exhibition is greatly supported by David Charak II, Follower Fund, Ted Rowland, Anonymous, Carrie Shapiro and Peter Frey, Elizabeth Levine, spreadsheet the Maxine and Stuart Frankel Bountiful Foundation.